How Wrong Can You Be?

Chronogical Blog Entries:

Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 12:49:50 +1100

The Sunday edition of the New York Times featured an interview with
George F. Colony, chief executive of Forrester Research, written by
Laura Rich.

The interview is titled "As I.T. Goes, So Goes Forrester?"

Those of you with a New York Times online subscription can read the
article here
.

One of the questions that Laura asked was as follows:

Q. Let's talk about Google. You came out against it to some degree last
year, citing competition from Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. But Google has
done well. Were you wrong?

A. This is how I saw it: that Google has three major challenges in front
of it.

No. 1 is competition. They have a lot of money, a lot of
power and they want Google's business, so probably No. 1 for
Google is competition.

Problem 2 for Google is what I call "switching costs." There
are no switching costs to move from one search engine to another.
Before Google, I used AltaVista. I changed to Google in about 27
seconds. I will leave Google in about 27 seconds.

The third problem is, Google is a fantastic technology for a
page-oriented, HTML-based Internet, which is what we have today.
The problem is, we're not going to stay in a page-oriented
world.

It was a rather soft interview. Because, he was not only wrong! He was
wrong, wrong, wrong!

Interesting that he quotes those above "challenges" as the reason that
Google will fail. In February 2003, I wrote an article which cited
his so-called problems as the reasons why Google had succeeded, was succeeding
and would continue to succeed!

If any of Forrester's customers actually paid for that analysis, and are
reading this, I would like you to know I am also available to do analysis ...